Philosophia Botanica ("Botanical Philosophy", ed. 1, Stockholm & Amsterdam, 1751.) was published by the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) who greatly influenced the development of botanical taxonomy and systematics in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is "the first textbook of descriptive systematic botany and botanical Latin".[1] It also contains Linnaeus's first published description of his binomial nomenclature.
Philosophia Botanica represents a maturing of Linnaeus's thinking on botany and its theoretical foundations, being an elaboration of ideas first published in his Fundamenta Botanica (1736) and Critica Botanica (1737), and set out in a similar way as a series of stark and uncompromising principles (aphorismen). The book also establishes a basic botanical terminology.
The following principle §79 demonstrates the style of presentation and Linnaeus's method of introducing his ideas.
§ 79 The parts of the plant are the root (radix), the leafy shoot (herba) and the organs of reproduction (fructificatio), that the leafy shoot consists of the stem (truncus), the leaves (folia), accessory parts (fulcra, according to § 84 stipules, bracts, spines, prickles, tendrils, glands and hairs) and hibernating organs (hibernacula, according to § 85 bulbs and buds), and that the organs of reproduction comprise the calyx, corolla, stamens, pistil, pericarp and receptacle.
A detailed analysis of the work is given in Frans Stafleu's Linnaeus and the Linnaeans, pp. 25–78.
- ^ Stearn, William T. (1992) [1966]. Botanical Latin: history, grammar, syntax, terminology and vocabulary (4th ed.). Portland, Or.: Timber Press. p. 35. ISBN 9780881923216. Retrieved 19 February 2015.